1. Testing In The Dark:
Lessons in Cross-Site Communication
Neil Studd, Amido

2. About Me (and my teams)
• Worked with teams around the world
• West: USA (Los Angeles, San Diego)
• Europe: Croatia, Germany, other UK remote-workers
• East: India, Malaysia
• Also been a remote worker occasionally myself
• Recurring, non-company-specific issues in these situations

3. What goes wrong?
• Misunderstood messages
• Loss of meaning (“crossed wires”)
• Ambiguity of language (reduced nuance)
• Uncertainty of whether anyone’s there
• Unpredictability of response time
• Generally taking longer to achieve the same thing
• For me, a worse communication experience than face-to-face

4. Why might remote communication be harder?
• Removing the visual, and often also the audio
• Higher interaction cost for beginning a new conversation
• Face-to-face = you just start talking
• Telephone = initiating a request to talk
• Video conference = finding a time when suitable, presentability concerns
• Non-native speakers: less time to react in real-time conversation
• Some people like the boundary walls which are created by distance
• So when you’re just left with words, how much meaning is left

5. Albert Mehrabian: “7% - 38% - 55% rule”
• Silent Messages (1971)
• Face-to-face, one-to-one exchanges
conveying a feeling/attitude
• How we weigh our liking of a person
• 7% words
• 38% tone of voice
• 55% facial expression
• To maximise “liking”, all 3 parts must be
congruent (no mixed messages)

6. Mehrabian’s research: Often overgeneralised
• “55% of messages received and processed by your brain are based on
your body language…”
• “38% of messages are processed based on your tone of voice…”
• “Only 7% of your received meaning will be based off the words you
are saying…”
https://www.accuconference.com/resources/non-verbal-communication.html

7. Albert Mehrabian: Implications of generalising
• Do you understand 93% of a
foreign speaker’s message, just
by looking at them?
• Do you understand 55% of a
speech when it’s on mute?
• Is IM only 7% as effective as
face-to-face communication?

8. You can overcome the lack of visibility…
• Words matter, more than many would have you believe!
• But there’s more to communication than just interpreting words.
• Looking more closely at email & instant messaging

9. My gripes with email and IM communication
• Uncertainty about when message is received
• Overcompensating for the above: read receipts!
• Getting stuck in large distribution lists/chains
• Difficult for people to track several distinct points in one discussion
• Emoticons/smilies are poor substitute for visual cues :/
• Nuances, turn-of-phrase, sarcasm: all evaporate (Poe’s Law)
• If there are language barriers: reduced opportunity for clarification/correction

10. How I handle email and IM communication
• Avoid them; favour real-time method
• When I have to use them:
• IM for a quick response to a simple question
• Email if I want to summarise more complex information
• Email: “Inbox Zero”
• Filters and Rules
• Try to communicate urgency (or non-urgency)

11. Email/IM tips from Karen Johnson at TestBash
• Use same language/style as your speech
• Open with a personal anecdote
• Help understand the pressures/events in
your office (the “why”)
• In other words, give context which the
medium otherwise omits
• Give examples of helpful answers
• Share profile pages

12. Communicating across timezones
• Delay in message delivery/receipt
• Can take days to exchange basic information; more with each
additional back-and-forth
• Each additional bit of information adds complexity and reduces
chance of getting all points addressed

13. Communicating locally…
• “Has build 52 been deployed to the test environment?”
• “Which test environment do you mean?”
• “Sorry, I didn’t realise there were several. I’m using UAT-3.”
• “OK – yes, I deployed there this morning.”
Time to communicate: 10s (spoken) to 30s (typed in IM)

14. Communicating to Malaysia…
• THU: 10am BST / 5pm MYT
“Has build 52 been deployed to the test environment?”
• FRI: 1am BST / 8am MYT
“Which test environment do you mean?”
• FRI: 8.30am BST / 3.30pm MYT
“Sorry, I didn’t realise there were several. I’m using UAT-3.”
• FRI: 9.30am BST / 4.30pm MYT
“Actually we’ve done build 53 today. I can revert to build 52 on
Monday if you need?”
Time to communicate: 24 hours, potentially more

15. Improving cross-timezone communication
• Focus on eliminating the lag in communication:
• Know when your working hours overlap (World Chat Clock)
• Keep these times free for cross-site discussions/standups
• Information radiators (no need to ask “is build 52 ready for testing?”)
• Dashboards (but watch out for “data puke”!)
• Kanban board: Trello
• Collaboration tools: Hackpad, Evernote, OneNote

16. WorldChatClock.com

17. Conference calls: Meeting without seeing
• Technology ramp-up: The start time is never the start
• Disconnections/connection issues which disrupt the call
• Lag producing the overlapping communication spiral
• Balancing background noise vs muted participants
• Mixed degrees of attention (or, in my experience, ridicule)
Isn't there a better way?

18. Meeting costs increase with # of attendees
http://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/
Conference, 90 people, guessing £100ph rate for each. After 45 mins:

19. How I handle… Conference calls
• Er, don’t do them?
• Videoconferencing can help (if latency/quality is good)
• Or 1-2-1 video chat (Skype etc)
• There are better ways to have productive group discussions

20. One productivity tool to rule them all?
Sqwiggle
• Tap thumbnail(s) for video chat
• Visual presence, not just “Busy/Away”
• Intrusive/weird at first
• “Now I can’t code in my pyjamas?!”
• You get used to it
• Requires team buy-in
(Plus everything else you’d expect: text chat, file sharing, tool integration)

21. One productivity tool to rule them all?
Slack
• Meaty chat app
• Quick, deep searching
• Potential email replacement
• Tool integration
• Range of platforms/apps
• Don’t mention the hack
(It does this better than Sqwiggle, but lacks equivalent webcam integration)
Honourable mention: HipChat, mature but not quite as dynamic as Slack

22. Thanks for your time!
Any questions?